Interesting video, as usual. I had read an biography of Catherine the Great, where she allows a doctor to insert a small amount of the puss from the postule of a small pox victim into her nose. This was the way it was presented to her, would be used to inoculate her people. Before giving permission, she went through the process herself. After two weeks of being seriously ill , high fever and the lot, she comes out just fine. No scars. She then give the doctor permission to inoculate her grandchildren, and her people. I personally found this a true insight of how she saw herself as a mother to her nation. Amazing woman. And death by smallpox was greatly reduced among her people.

As is typical, female innovators are overlooked all to often in history. She may not have “discovered” it but she brought it to England.

OUTSTANDING topic! I learned about Lady Mary in Respiratory Therapy school. I forgot about the origin of the word. This topic gave me the chills, it was that good. Keep it up!! Ironically we had a Mary who was the opposite, "Typhoid Mary". I find it a travesty that women were looked down upon in those days, even up until recent history. We have Florence Nightingale to thank for The Red Cross and the nursing profession. Madam Currie? For X-Rays. The list goes on. We have the moral obligation with today's technology, to give credit it's due. I read a quote once. "Women are like teabags. You don't know their strength until they are in hot water." How true it is.

Thank you, I’m in the U. S. And so tired of the debate over something that has always had some risks but was better than the alternative, and has been working for such a long period of history. I wish more “leaders” knew their history.

So interesting! The ottomans and moors were both incredibly enlightened cultures and I love that they made space for smart women and showed a large degree of tolerance all around- something which later, and supposedly more “civilized”, European societies and rulers would fail to do and thus, fail to benefit from, unfortunately… This story is a good example of the ways in which ethnocentric and sexist interpretations of the past have not been corrected. The fact that there continues to be a lack of attention and appreciation given to Ms. Montagu for her contribution to Public Health in the Western world is further proof that our approach to recording and studying history can often serve to continue these archaic, narrow minded and bigoted perspectives from within the historical record… demonstrating they’re actually quite prevalent and still being reinforced in the present day. 😒 I have a masters in public health but never knew any of this smallpox vaccine history of the time between the invention in China and Jenner’s cowpox one- but it makes a great deal of sense and could be helpful for studying future innovation. We’re just simply told Jenner invented the 1st inoculation/vaccine (although it actually was just the 1st in the West 🤷🏼‍♀️) and we’re not directed to ponder those millennia of cultural/knowledge exchange at all… Ugh 🤦🏼‍♀️🤬🙄🤦🏼‍♀️. Only recently did I learn from a history doc that Queen Victoria inoculated her youngest children against smallpox after refusing to do it to the others for many years… it was obvs carried out through this more rudimentary, crude process and unfortunately, a daughter happened to come down with a serious case afterward, and she died. This was a really interesting topic and would love to look at more health/medical practices of those in the past! Definitely stretched my brain a great deal, & I’m very glad to learn something new today! Thanks for all your work and sharing it with us!

Did you know that Washington had the American army inoculated at Valley Forge? After that units that were going to meet the army were suppose to stop at small pox hospitals set up in the various areas of the then colonies. Before the Revolution, it was illegical to inoculate in Virginia. So some Maryland doctors set up small pox hospitals along the Potomac and had made a cottage industry of the practice.

You mentioned Variola minor, this is a mild form of smallpox with a mortality of about 1% compared to variola major with a mortality of 30%. When the Turks talked about "the best sort of smallpox" it's thought that they may have been referring to variola minor. I don't expect that the English doctors appreciated the difference and this could have contributed to variolation being less safe. Good talk about a very interesting woman.

My generation were all immunized during our childhood. Greece 1960s . I can still remember how I suffered [fever etc] but the result is that nowadays there is no smallpox in Greece. Our children don't need a smallpox vaccine. I can see that your video was made before Corona virus but I think that your story has an analogy in our times. One of my favourite British authors Roald Dahl lost a child because of lack of measles immunisation. Thank you for the interesting story!

My grandmother had smallpox as a small child which would have around 1900. Around 20 years later, my father had polio. Both diseases which I was vaccinated against in the 1950s. Fast forward to 2021, I just received my second COVID-19 vaccination.

Definitely interesting! It will be lovely when "history" is updated to reflect more comprehensive, holistic narratives. Thank you for sharing Mary's role with us! 😊💖

Her poetry is quite good-concise and deft. The Turkish Embassy Letters are, collectively, a masterpiece. And then there was her long affair with a much younger Italian intellectual, Algarotti; and her supposed refusal of Alexander Pope’s amorous advances, which earned her his undying ire. Lady Mary knew how to live.

There needs to be a movie.

This reminds me of seeing the photograph of Margaret Hamilton, who wrote the code for the Apollo 11. We know the astronauts, but never the women who were able to get them there!

A 2003 book, "The Speckled Monster", not only recounts the story of Lady Mary, but also that of Dr Zabdiel Boylston in Boston at the same time. Because of trade going back and forth across the Atlantic, the pandemic spread from England to the colonies. The story actually begins with the death of Queen Anne from smallpox (in gruesome detail). Dr. Boylston learned variolation from his African slave, as the practice there was similar to that in the Ottoman Empire.

Brilliant! I knew none of this about Lady Mary!! Excellent!! Thank you!! ❤

I got interested in Jenner through reading Influenza... then delved further... Then wanted to look at the dairymaid idea related to its standing as a job. I’m suddenly reading Invisible Women: big data in a world designed for men... and so delved into looking at the women related to epidemics. That took me to an article from Yale referring to the whole part about a lady Wortley Montagu. And tonight I just wanted to find out a bit more about Jenner and Montagu and voila... great video!!!!! Thanks you for this great synopsis and also yes, Zealand’s should be questioning more the scientific ethics of selecting guinea pigs. I think I might also read the Turkish Embassy Letters at some point. I was also fascinated that Jenner had to self-publish before his findings were taken as being a probable solution.

I’ve always been fascinated by this lady, I first heard about her in my June & schoolfriend Book of Heroines 1970!!! 😊

What a brilliant female Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was. As usual a terrific tale about an intelligent and capable woman. Thanks for all of your hard work on our behalf. ;-)

So interesting! I have a masters in public health but never knew any of this history past Jenner- only recently did I see a history doc abt Queen Victoria vaccinating her youngest children, which was totally interesting and stretched my brain a great deal, glad to learn something new today!

Thanks very much for this video. My father had smallpox in south Texas around 1914.

I live in Istanbul and have heard this story, but wondered if it was true. Thank you. Santa Claus also came from Turkey, also King Midas, King Croesus, and a whole lot of other stories we thought were myths.

Given the current pandemic....this seems so timely. Amazing, thank you

Fascinating. Never heard of this lady. She was ahead of her time.

Catherine the Great also promoted variolation in Russia in the 1780s I think. While she is picking up on the good work of the ottomans and the bringing of this knowledge to England by lady MWM she was a pioneer in the face of stiff opposition in her own country.

Thank you for this crystal clear capture of a piece of womens history🙏🌻

This is so fascinating! I didn't know about any of this! Thank you so much!

.... ‘perhaps the name played a part’.. lol 😂 Dr Kat you’re so funny!

Abigail Adams was another forward looking and thinking woman. She inoculated her children herself. One of her children almost succumbed, but recovered. They were all found to be immune after that point.

I agree that Lady Mary deserves much more recognition. I love your videos. I'm starting my PGCE history teacher training in September and so am doing lots of work to familiarise myself with topics I've never studied before; your videos are both interesting and very helpful. Thank you!

Wow, awesome! You will never know what you are going to learn when you love history!

I had heard about Mary Montagu and smallpox, but it was nice to have some of the backstory with it.

Fascinating bit of history, particularly as I've discovered it nearly a year after its airing while we are living during the COVID19 pandemic. There are many other interesting, and timely, points brought up relating to the role of women in history, and our Western-centrist view of history. Much on which to reflect.

Great video, while studying British Literature at BSU, Idaho, USA. Thank you for this enlightening video.

Holy crap you know a lot of interesting information! We as a species should probably be learning more about subject like this. You are one smart person, and I love this newly discovered channel.

I want you to know I love your Pod casts. I love they way you explain and the tours you have done with your husband. There is so much to tell you will never runout of things to talk about.

This is my favorite!!! Fantastic job

I am so grateful that you have unveiled the name of Lady Mary Wortley Montague. I teach English in Italy and am always looking for wonderful English women ( yes, old fashioned feminist, vintage Jane Fonda, nearly,) I have often talked about the smallpox and Lady Mary. Next week in high school English I am going to 'redo' Lady Mary. Absolutely perfect timing with Corona virus running around. I have to say that young men here support their female counterparts so they don't seem have this gender hang up! So few people, even in England, have heard about her and bang on about Jenner. It's really not on. We have to push the agenda...But there are still believers in the flat earth!!! Can you please push it a bit further and go on to Ada Lovelace. We love Alan Turing but we need woman power to be acknowledged!! You are doing such a great job in reaching out to people who might not have been interested in the past...now they hopefully can see it as a road map for the future!! Best wishes

Very interesting! Thank you 😊

I had no idea about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This was wonderful. Thank you so very much.

OMG! My director of nursing and I were just discussing the "Covid" parties some eastern friends have had! One contracts it then the family gathers... I can't believe you educated us on where this began!! Thank you!! Now you know why I stay a loyal fan!

fantastic and interesting!

I just rewatched this video and loved it. Amid the disinformation around vaccines now, have you considered doing a video that highlights other women in history who have been influential in vaccines or medical discoveries?... OR, have you considered doing one or more videos on notable women of color through early modern history? I'd love to see those!

F&#%ing facinating!

Thank you for teaching me about this brilliant woman. I love this channel so much. Came here because, like so many, I am fascinated by Elizabeth 1, Queen Isabella and Empress Mathilda. I am discovering so many fascinating personalities and historical thanks to you. Love, love, love this channel!

Thank you so much for bringing this story to light!

SO Fascinating! I enjoyed this very much!

Being-as I describe myself- "A REASONABLE Feminist", the difference being that I've neither dyed my hair with Kool-Aid, nor do I hold MEN to be a species inferior to cockroaches; I am joyously married to an intelligent, tolerant man and father of 2girls. All this having been said, I find it revolting in the extreme that the practice in the Past was to regard FEMALES in the same light that so many militant Present-Day Feminists regard males. This squaring-off of our 2 genders is perhaps the reasom the Trans Community say we have an infinite number of genders. I THINK THAT IS UNDILUTED CODSWALLOP!!

It’s more she popularized inoculation rather than introduced to the west. There is some writings that the Welsh were practicing it well back in the 1600s. And Cotton Mather wrote of how a Libyan showed him the practice. A doctor Emanuel Timonius wrote to the Royal Society about it a few years before Lady Montagu. That she was of the nobility helped spread the practice faster than it either wise would have been.

Incredible! I have sourced this video to friends, I adore the way you talk about such subjects, always holding my attention with such an interesting true story. Thankyou!

HI DR KAT! it is such a foresight!!

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you for that history lesson.

Thanks so much for all your very interesting content, especially about some women I either hadn't heard about (like Aphra Behn) or heard very biased stories (like Anne of Cleves). I’m very glad I found your channel!

I believe that she should have. Gotten a lot of credit for her work !

So many great women, lost to the past. Thank you for bringing some of out of the musty past. There is a reason why it's called "His story" according to most men of the past women were insignificant.

Brilliant, thank you.

Very interesting! Thank you!

I love ❤️ your historically informative videos! I’m a fan, much love 💛💜 to you from Florida, U.S.

I enjoyed watching the video of lady Mary wortley montage !

Brilliant and informative. Thank you.

Fascinating.

I learnt about Edward Jenner and the milk aids who got cowpox pustules on their hands but were observed to be free from smallpox thereafter. But why was the variolation technique taught as well? I suppose as it involved deaths it was perhaps due to people dying. I think I was in the third year of secondary school. But my grandmother born in 1909 and later became a nurse, had talked about smallpox, I do not know if this was from seeing it as an active infection or from scars left after infection. I do know from the discussion with my grandmother that the vaccinations helped drastically reduced the number of people affected by the infection. Because of my grandmother, again, I recognised the importance of the total irradiation of smallpox from the world population. Learning at the same time that the virus was still held in a few designated labs around the world. As a student nurse a group of us had a debate about whether it was right or even ethical to keep the live virus in any lab and that it would be better to destroy any smallpox samples. Brilliant presentation. I have enjoyed most of your video presentation, but this one especially. It was a topic I knew something about but more importantly, for me, it reminded me of my maternal grandmother, and her daughter, both long since dead. But still in my heart. Once again thank you for the work that goes into your video presentation, I have enjoyed, and learnt, from all of them.

I think that the reason they tested on children has to do with the concept of childhood or lack of it. It isn't really until the end of the 1700's that the idea of childhood begins to take shape and it is codified in culture during the victorian period. Before that children were seen more as miniature adults and also possesions. So, i just think it wouldn't have crossed their minds that children are special with special rights as it would to us today.

Thank you for the warning about pausing while eating as I was doing just that. I’ll be back to finish shortly. lol

Excellent work!

Living in our present time it is difficult to really comprehend how women were given little credit for major and/or creative innovations! Our writers and movie makers use the female character as people ahead of their time, I THINK WE MUST FORCE an immersion in the culture of gender then threaded into every aspect of a Women’s life. Mary educated herself, avoided marriage with the wrong man, eloped with a man who obviously supported her intellectual journey! The majority of females were not able to achieve these goals! We usually don’t allow this to fully inundate our concept of the historical lives of woman! Enjoy the way you bring the people to our attention! I have a fascination with herb and plant medications and the men and women daring to study and use them!

Excellent video Kat!

Very interesting. Like others, I had no awareness of the origins of vaccinations for the pox. Thank you!

Ugh... I just love this channel

Very interesting....thank you

The original Chicken Pox parties!

When I was researching vaccinations as I already knew about Jenner and was trying to prove to some vaccination had been around for hundreds of years. While researching I came across Lady Montagu. Very interesting read and I definitely used that information in my argument that vaccinations were not a 20th century manifestation.

What a wonderful discovery here. Good on you, you have a new subscriber 👍

really interesting video and I love your dress, am I allowed to say that oh what the hell keep up the great work. paul a fan.

I think that when children caught smallpox they always died. So experimentation was deemed acceptable. Children died so easily back then, from everything we shrug off these days.

I have a question for you as an historian, which is: how were children generally treated in early modern times? Obviously, when all was well, then as now, children grew up in loving homes, were trained for a living of some sort, and carried on much as we do now. But, from the enactment of the Elizabethan poor laws until the BC pill changed everything in the mid 1960's, when women were pregnant without a contract with a male, either under the auspices of church or state, they were sequestered in strange places among strangers until their baby was born, at which point, if they came from a loving family, their mother might pass the child off as their own while the 'older sister', worked to help support the baby and the rest of the family. There might be some issue with her ability to marry thereafter, but the child would be loved. But what about girls and women from less loving homes, or from families that were wrapped up in social climbing, or reputation, or religious judgement? What about the children of the poor, those of women who died in childbirth, whose partners worked 14 hours a day for enough food to feed themselves? Based on my interpretation of what I have learned, such children, whether boys or girls, were not welcomed. At best, even if materially provided for, they were outcasts. Until after WWII many such children, called "Home Children", were shipped over here to Canada and around the world and assigned to new parents whose whims and foibles ruled. There were contracts stating the children had to be cared for and receive an education, but there was rarely any enforcement. Those were completed only after community outrage. Many 'parents' really wanted maids and farmhands. So, of course poor children could be experimented on by what passed for a doctor in the 17th century. They were expendable.

Love this video.

good job doc! i love smoking a joint and sitting back

Thank you. Very interesting and useful :)

Very interesting!

Love this video

Hello Dr Kat, I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your channel and I was wondering if you could do an episode on Emma Hamilton, thank you again for giving me something to look forward to during this trying time.

Might this Montagu family be the same as, or any relation to the Montague / Montagu lineage associated with, Boughton Hall (Northamptonshire) currently owned by the Duke of Buccleuch; and / or is there a relation with Viscount Montagu / Hinchingbrooke, presently associated with Ma(l)perton (aka: Mapperton House) in Dorset - Wiltshire County?

Hello , i enjoy your talks xx

Actually is was the 'set of old women' from Turkey that credit due, was withheld.

It's important to note that Jenner exposed the boy he vaccinated with a smallpox variolation, so while his practice was unethical by today's standard, it was not as dangerous as simply exposing him to "wild" smallpox. As a child, Jenner was variolated himself, and suffered quite a bit, so he was both actively looking for an alternative, and building on the technique Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought to England.

I emjoyed this episode. I have never heard anything about Lady Mary. Of course Lady Mary's contributions were downplayed. The all male drs couldn't let a woman get credit for practicing better medicine than they did! The very idea was absurd!! Lady Mary had a scandal-ridden past and I'm sure that the whole sordid episode was trotted out again to discredit her. That she was able to reach the Royal family and have the Royal daughters vaccinated is astounding. I'll ask my mother, who is a retired Director of Nursing if she learned about Lady Mary during her training in the early 1960s.

With the high infant and child mortality of the period - I'm guessing there was a high probability that lower class children and babies would die anyway. Before that happened, they could be used as lab rats. I don't know how much "personhood" these children were assumed to possess. Of course, children from the aristocracy were closer to being "actual" people, but for lower class infants, they may have been assumed to be not "real" until they were old enough to be useful.

I remember being so ill after my 2nd small pox vaccination-oye veh. I read that Elizabeth I has small pox and put on great tons of that white (lead based?) facial makeup partially to hide her scars and partly because it was the style of the day. True? False? I will add to my Epidemiological story bank.

Very interesting. Another person I hadn't heard of.

Great video and thank you for telling the story of a fascinating woman. I have read somewhere also that she was able to visit the turkish hareems also during her stay in turkey ?

Silly question, but could anyone tied to Lady Mary have had anything to do with the Voynich? Since she was obsessed with Turkey, maybe ?

It's always interesting when someone finds a home far from the land of his or her birth, as Lady Mary did in Turkey. I wonder if the larger "English cuts" made their recipients prone to infection.

....the timing...... :)

How interesting! More not well known medical history please.

Clotworthy Skeffington probably looked like his name.

I almost skipped over this video because the name did not ring a bell at all. But I do remember reading about Lady Worly Montague. What an interesting and inspiring story! I wonder if you could refer to immunization somewhere in the title to attract more viewers? Nevertheless great video!

It seems to me, it was considered acceptable to variolate the orphan children, because children, due to the high mortality rate experienced by infants and children at the time, were considered expendable, and easily replaceable. There were always more orphans than could be properly cared for, and they had no adult protectors, no guardians invested in their individual well being. Sad, but a likely possibility.

Might I offer two answers to your question? What passed for 'civilization' in England (to paraphrase a Biblical reference, "Can any good come out of the East?"); and misogyny, )"What could a woman possibly know?").

People might have thought that a child has a whole life ahead, and so , more chances to suffer from a disease, so inoculating them seemed more charitable. However, by nowadays standard this is much different. Thanks for info, never heard of the lady , before .😃

Another thing Lady Mary noticed about Turkish women was the lack of red marks on their bodies, since they didn't wear stays (corsets).